This attempt to prevent the
USS Perpetual War from sinking into the ocean of government debt
is not succeeding, in part because of the weak arguments advanced by
the spend-more-on-defense crowd – do they really expect that conservative
Republicans are going to agree with Robert Kagan that “it doesn’t
make fiscal sense to cut the defense budget when everyone is scrambling
for measures to stimulate the economy”? A generally unstated but important
part is because of who is making these arguments.

After all, these are the same
people who, in the 1990s, invented something called “National Greatness
Conservatism,” which held up wars, the building of gigantic national
monuments, and other costly pyramid-building schemes as the ne plus
ultra of conservative thought. More recently, they claimed the Iraq
war would be a “cakewalk” that would “pay for itself” – and
dreamed of a large-scale military/social engineering project in the
Middle East that would “drain the swamp” and lead to a “global
democratic revolution” led by George W. Bush. And we all know how
that turned out.

Defeated at the polls, and
discredited within their own movement, the neocons retreated back into
their subsidized think tanks and literary sanctuaries, of which The
American Spectator is the Pinta to the Weekly Standard’s
Santa Maria. From these redoubts, they presume to direct the course
of the movement they brought to disaster, and correct deviations from
the neocon party line, oblivious to the reality that few conservatives
outside the Beltway are actually heeding their sage advice.

Neocons have never cared much
for domestic policy: my theory is that it bores them. A single nation
can hardly contain the grandiosity of their worldview [.pdf], the globe-spanning
hubris of their vision of America, once described by neocon guru Bill
Kristol as a “benevolent global hegemon.”

This is what neoconservatism
is all about. On domestic policy, the neocons are all over the map,
and especially on the relationship between government and the economy
they are positively chameleon-like. Today the neocons are careful to
blend their voices with the “anti-government” sentiment that motivates
the conservative base, but it seems like only yesterday that Fred Barnes
was hailing the arrival of what he called “Big Government Conservatism”
in the pages of the Standard: the similarities between a policy
aspiring to “national greatness” – another of Kristol’s hobby-horses –
and “the Great Society” of LBJ’s day are not merely rhetorical.

When it comes to foreign policy,
however, there is no modulating their rhetoric or hiding their agenda.
It’s all about war – agitating for it, praising the virtues it supposedly
instills, and always arguing that we should have gone to war yesterday,
but today will do (e.g., the McCain-Graham critique of Obama’s
Libyan intervention).

The neoconservative persuasion,
as Bill’s dad dubbed it, was born in the deepest winter of the cold
war, when American school-kids were told to “duck and cover” as
the shadow of nuclear war hovered over the American Dream. These former
leftists, who once worshiped at the altar of Leon Trotsky, did an about-face
and transferred their allegiance from the Red Army to the US Army with
varying degrees of rapidity – but always with great displays of polemical
fireworks. James Burnham, Max Shachtman, Kristol Père, and a large
number of lesser lights, all went on to become the most fanatical advocates
of what Burnham, a founding editor of National Review, deemed
the “rollback” strategy – military confrontation with the Soviet
Union on a world scale. Murray Rothbard relates his personal experiences of what they meant by “rollback” in his book, The Betrayal of
the American Right:

“The more I circulated
among these people, the greater my horror because I realized with growing
certainty that what they wanted above all was total war against
the Soviet Union; their fanatical warmongering would settle for no less.”

“Of course the New Rightists
of National Review would never quite dare to admit this crazed
goal in public, but the objective would always be slyly implied. At
right-wing rallies no one cheered a single iota for the free market,
if this minor item were ever so much as mentioned; what really stirred
up the animals were demagogic appeals by
National Review leaders for total victory, total destruction of the
Communist world. It was that which brought the right-wing masses out
of their seats. It was National Review editor Brent Bozell who
trumpeted, at a right-wing rally: “I would favor destroying not only
the whole world, but the entire universe out to the furthermost star,
rather than suffer Communism to live.” It was
National Review editor Frank Meyer who once told me:
“I have a vision, a great vision of the future: a totally devastated
Soviet Union.” I knew that this was the vision that really animated
the new Conservatism. Frank Meyer, for example, had the following argument
with his wife, Elsie, over foreign-policy strategy: Should we drop the
H-Bomb on Moscow and destroy the Soviet Union immediately and without
warning (Frank), or should we give the Soviet regime 24 hours with which
to comply with an ultimatum to resign (Elsie)?”

When the cold war ended, the
neocons didn’t go out of business – they just went into hibernation,
retreating to their richly-endowed think tanks and denouncing the GOP
majority in the House of Representatives for threatening to defund Bill
Clinton’s conquest of Kosovo. Kristol, yearning to “crush Serb skulls,”
as he put it, threatened to walk out of the GOP.

Too bad he didn’t, because
he and his comrades went on to dominate the conservative movement of
the 1990s and eventually lead the party into the oblivion of the Bush
era, when the oxymoronic Big Government Conservatism the neocons had
been pushing was actually put into practice.

For decades, libertarians had
been arguing, to little avail, that modern conservatism – the “new”
conservatism of William F. Buckley, Jr., as promulgated in National
Review – with its commitment to unmitigated militarism, would only
lead to fiscal collapse and the subversion of our republican form of
government. Today, these arguments have wide appeal, and not just to
conservatives. Paul’s prescient calling of the 2008 economic implosion
gave him real credibility and his second attempt to wrest the GOP presidential
nomination is gaining traction, albeit mainly under the media’s radar.
Last time around, the neocons targeted Paul as the virtual antithesis
of all they stand for, and this time, too, they are sharpening their
knives, ready to go after their ideological antipode hammer and tongs.

It’s early, yet, but already
we have the main narrative of the neocon script, as evidenced in Jeffrey
Lord’s American Spectatorjeremiad, wherein an entire laundry
list of charges are laid out in convenient indictment form. There’s
just one problem: Lord’s charges are a tenuous tissue of lies. Tenuous
because, once one challenges the historical ignorance on which they’re
founded, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

I won’t bother with Lord’s
nonsensical characterization of Paul as a “neo-liberal” – his
record shows he isn’t any kind of modern liberal, or, indeed, a modern
anything – except to note that is what leftists typically call
neocons, and, indeed, anyone to their right. Nor will I deal with the
charge that Paul and his followers fail to pay sufficient obeisance
to such conservative icons as Buckley, Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh,
Edwin Meese, Antonin Scalia, etc., except to note that Reagan and Paul
were friends, and the Gipper endorsed Paul in fulsome terms during a
difficult Republican party primary.

Instead, I’ll just deal with
the massive falsification of history indulged in by Lord, which involves
a complete inversion of events as they occurred. In citing Paul’s
non-interventionist foreign policy views, Lord declares that Paul is
really a “liberal Republican,” because, after all, it was “the
liberal Republicans of their day” who were the “isolationists”
who opposed getting into two world wars. Lord names Senators William E.
Borah, Gerald Nye, and the LaFollette brothers as exemplars of the species.
These guys were RINOs, he avers, squishy moderates, and even leftists
– but this is actually very far from the truth.

To begin with, I don’t know
of anyone who glorifies our entry into the Great War – except, of
course, for the neocons, who exult in any and all military conflict,
as long as the US is actively involved. Is it really unquestionable
that we should have gone to war to preserve the British, French, and
Russian empires, as against that of the Kaiser and the Hapsburgs? European
civilization was nearly wiped out, and the conflict was the crucible
that gave rise to the twin totalitarianisms of Communism and National
Socialism. As for World War II, the opposition to that war was almost
exclusively the province of American conservatives, who opposed “Roosevelt’s
war” because they thought he meant to use it as an excuse to clamp
on economic controls and transform the American system – in retrospect,
a pretty accurate diagnosis, in my view.

The “liberal Republicans”
Lord writes of were a minority within the anti-interventionist movement,
and they were no kind of “moderate” Republicans of the sort we would
find recognizable. Borah, Nye, and other Midwestern Republicans were
known as progressives – indeed, they formed their own party and ran
Teddy Roosevelt (that old warmonger!) for President early in the century.
They were against bigness – big corporations, as well as big
government – and saw Wall Street as utilizing the instrument of government
to advance its own interests at public expense. Generally supportive
of the New Deal in the beginning, they turned when FDR tried to pack the Supreme Court, and then set up the National Recovery Administration
as a kind of corporate syndicalism. In short, these “liberal Republicans” joined the ranks of the President’s
most implacable enemies – the very “economic royalists” they had
once denounced. Conservative businessmen such as H. Smith Richardson, the Vick Chemical Company tycoon,
Gen. Robert E. Wood, head of Sears & Roebuck, and Henry Regnery,
the Midwestern businessman who later started the first conservative
publishing concern, were the core of the opposition to Roosevelt’s
economic policies, and the financial center of the Republican party.

Lord shoves this well-known
history down the Memory Hole, and replaces it with a version made for
the dumbed-down cable-TV/talk-radio world that he and his fellow neocons
imagine will turn on Paul. This shows the utter contempt the neocons
have for their supposed constituency: just throw the rubes some red
meat (it doesn’t matter if it’s rotten) and they’ll gobble it
down, no questions asked.

But I have a few questions
for Lord, such as: where does he get his lessons in Bizarro history?
He cites historical “facts,” and then not only manages to get them
stupidly wrong, but turns the truth on its head. Such as his accusation
that, because a book list offered by the Paul organization recommends As We Go Marching, by John T. Flynn, that Paul is “anti-Semitic”
– because, you see, Flynn was anti-Semitic, too, and birds of a feather….

In the first half of the 1930s, Flynn was a popular writer
for The New Republic, and other mass market magazines, author
of several best-selling books on economic matters, and a liberal of
some note. With the coming of the New Deal, however, Flynn turned rightward,
and by the 1950s he was one of America’s leading conservative voices.
What won him over to the conservative cause – aside from the increasingly corporatist direction the New Deal was taking – was the right’s vehement
opposition to US entry into World War II, and he became the head of
the New York chapter of the American First Committee (AFC), which was
led by “isolationist” (i.e. anti-interventionist) conservatives.
The issue of whether to enter the war pitted the right against the left,
with the latter taking the militantly pro-war position – especially
after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. Lefties, generally sympathetic
to the Soviets, ditched their previously held antiwar views and jumped
on the War Party’s bandwagon, going all out to save the “worker’s
fatherland” no matter how many lives – and principles – were lost
in the process.

The left viciously attacked
the AFC as the “Nazi transmission belt.” The neocons of today, in
labeling opponents of their post-9/11 strategy of world conquest “pro-terrorist,”
and “appeasers,” took a page from history in limning the Roosevelt
administration’s accusations against the “isolationists” – that
in opposing war, they were consorting with the Enemy. Lord, who spends
so much time trying to convince us Ron Paul is a “leftist,” sounds
just like one of these leftist character assassins of days gone by when
he accuses Flynn of anti-Semitism, because that is precisely what they
did say about him – a charge entirely without any basis in fact.

Indeed, far from being anti-Semitic,
Flynn was fanatical in his opposition to Nazism, and vehement in his
campaign to rid the movement of anti-Semitic elements who tried to latch
on to the AFC. As New York City chapter leader, he personally reviewed
each and every letter they received offering support, checking it twice
for evidence of any unsavory opinions. When Joe McWilliams, a dime-store
American Hitler, and head of the “American Destiny Party,” showed
up at a Madison Square Garden AFC rally, Flynn denounced him from the
speakers’ platform, noting dryly that that pro-war media always knew
where to find him.

It was Flynn, furthermore,
who personally rebuked Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator and spokesman
for the AFC, after the infamous Des Moines address, in which the Lone
Eagle identified Jews as one of three groups pushing for war. In a
letter to Lindbergh, Flynn noted that while some Jewish leaders had
inaccurately equated opposition to the war with anti-Semitism, and that
it would be disastrous to make the war an ethnic issue, as the aviator
had claimed in his speech, it was Lindbergh who had done precisely that.
Surely pro-war propagandists who argue in such terms should be taken
to task, said Flynn,

“But this is a far different
matter from going out upon the public platform and denouncing
‘the Jews’ as the war-makers. No man can do that without incurring
the guilt of religious and racial intolerance.”

This is an anti-Semite?

Lord’s faked-up “evidence”
of Flynn’s bigotry is a speech by Senator Nye, supposedly written
by Flynn, in which the Senator goes after Hollywood for pushing pro-war
messages in films, naming leading movie studio executives by name –
and, because most of these executives were Jewish, this, according to
Lord, is prima facie evidence of “anti-Semitism.” Yet the
same speech also goes after “British movie actors” for exerting
the same influences, as well as pro-Communist elements: is the act of
merely pronouncing someone’s name an “anti-Semitic” act? According
to Lord, it is indeed – and one cannot really argue with such dogmatic
ignorance.

Once again, Lord gets his history
all wrong: indeed, he manages to turn the truth upside down. Because
the real point of the hearings that investigated Hollywood’s bias
in the war debate was over the question of monopoly: the movie
industry was tightly controlled by the studios back then, on account
of legal and economic realities of the time. Flynn and the anti-interventionist
Senators were making the point that the studios wanted to save England’s
skin because it represented a good chunk of their market, and their
acting (and directing) talent. Economics rather than ethnicity was the
central issue for Flynn and Nye: being Jewish had nothing to do with
it.

The pro-war media of the time,
staunchly pro-FDR and viciously partisan, took precisely the line echoed
by Lord: the conservative media, notably the Chicago Tribune,
defended the hearings. After wading through thousands of words in which
Lord tries to paint Paul, and the America Firsters, as “liberal Republicans,”
RINOs, and “leftists,” he repeats nearly word-for-word the accusations
hurled at Flynn, Nye, and the rest by the most radical lefties of the
day.

By repeating the standard leftist
(and neocon) lies about the pre-WWII conservative movement, Lord hopes
he can count on the ignorance of his audience – the conservatives
of the year 2011 – to make them fall for it. That may have worked
as recently as the last presidential election cycle, but this time around I rather
doubt it: conservatives are rediscovering their own history, their
real history, and getting back to their roots. Flynn’s works are
a treasure trove in that regard, and anyone reading him today is going
to immediately recognize that the issues he wrote about – the relationship
of perpetual war and economic regimentation of the home front – are still at
the center of the debate.

The idea that Paul is a “leftist”
because he wants to return to the foreign policy of the Founders – who
inveighed against going abroad “in search of monsters to destroy” – is
patently absurd: even more ludicrous is Lord’s invocation of
the timeworn smears of twentieth century leftists against the
conservatives
of yesteryear – and then pretending that authentic conservatives like
Flynn were “men of the left.” They were not. Indeed, they have far
more claim to that title than Lord and his cronies in the Hate Paul
Brigade, who have to resort to falsifying history in order to smear
a brave and decent man.

The most ridiculous charge
coming from Lord – and, believe me, it’s a fierce competition –
is perhaps his contention that the mere use of the word “neocon,”
or neoconservative, is evidence of anti-Semitism. He “reasons” that
since very many of the leading lights of neoconservatism are Jewish,
that therefore “neocon” is a “code word” for “Jew.” On that
basis, one could conclude that an attack on libertarianism is suggestive of
an anti-Semitic pogrom, since virtually all the leading lights of the
movement Paul comes from – with the exception of Friedrich Hayek
– were of the Jewish faith: Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard (Paul’s
friend and intellectual inspiration), Ayn Rand, and the list goes on.
But of course no one on our side of the barricades would ever
make such an accusation on such flimsy “evidence” – we’ll leave
that to the professional character assassins, of which Lord is a leading
practitioner.

By the way: who the heck
isJeffrey Lord, anyway? During the Reagan administration he held
the non-job of White House “assistant political director,”
i.e. professional political hack. However, his most recent claim to
fame is a weird footnote to the Shirley Sherrod brouhaha. Lord wrote
an article for the American Spectator
claiming that Sherrod’s cousin – who had been attacked by three
white policemen, and beaten to death with truncheons and lead pipes
– hadn’t really been lynched, as she claimed, because the lynchers
didn’t use a rope to hang him, but instead bludgeoned him to death.

The reaction to his piece was
swift and unanimous: even other
writers for the
Spectatordenounced him, and the magazine tried to distance
itself from such a loopy assertion. Rather than admit he was wrong,
and let it go at that, Lord kept digging, insisting that, no, it wasn’t a lynching
based on some obscure quasi-legal argument.

That someone notorious for
racial insensitivity – at the very least! – has the nerve to accuse
anyone of bigotry takes the cake: Lord should get some kind of prize.
His assault on Paul – and Flynn – is nothing but a classic case
of projection.

Dr. Paul has become a lightning
rod for all the worst tendencies in American politics: the neocons,
the “Progressive” imperialists in the Obama camp, the Republican
Establishment, and the crazed nationalists – or, as Lew Rockwell calls
them, “red-state fascists” – who worshiped Bush II and handed
the presidential nomination to John McCain,
who never saw a war he didn’t want to involve the US in. Together,
these factions have run the country into the ground, crippling the economy
and making us hated all around the world. Their day is over – Ron’s
has just begun.

Author: Justin Raimondo

Justin Raimondo is editor-at-large at Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].
View all posts by Justin Raimondo